Bitter Choice Faced Captive Seized With Son

Three-year-old Filipp is home now after spending three days curled up with his mother under a hospital bed, hoping to escape the notice of the Chechen separatists who were holding them and hundreds of others hostage.

When he got back to his grandparents’ house, the first toy he picked up was a gun so he could pretend to be a sniper, said his mother, Svetlana. And the boy keeps asking after his Aunt Larisa, who was used as a human shield by the Chechens and shot in the chest when Russian forces tried to storm the hospital in the southern city of Budennovsk at dawn Saturday.

Svetlana was faced with the kind of choice most people hope they never have to make: take advantage of the Chechens’ offer to release women with children under 4 or stay with her 23-year-old sister, who lay bleeding on the floor untreated for a day because the hospital operating rooms had been destroyed in the failed Russian rescue attempt.

“If I were alone, I would never have left her, but I had to save my son,” she said simply. “I couldn’t even say goodby, because I was afraid if I stayed any longer, I wouldn’t be able to get out.”

Larisa was freed Sunday, a day after her sister and nephew, and was in serious condition following surgery at a nearby hospital. Hundreds of others, however, were still being held in the besieged Budennovsk hospital.

The ordeal of Budennovsk, a sleepy town of 54,000 in the flat, green Russian breadbasket, has inspired fear and pity across this giant country. Svetlana, 30, says her life has now been divided into two chapters--the first ended when she was taken hostage.

Svetlana sat in her parents’ kitchen on a steaming hot Sunday evening, waiting for her mother to come home from the hospital with news of her sister’s condition and explaining how a band of about 100 Chechen guerrillas rounded up hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Russian hostages.

She told her story on condition that her family’s last name not be used, because her parents fear reprisal.

“In our country, anything may happen,” she said.

Svetlana lives in St. Petersburg with her husband and had brought Filipp to visit her parents in Praskoveya, a tiny village a few miles outside Budennovsk. She was riding on a bus into town with her sister and son to buy tickets back to St. Petersburg when a group of heavily armed Chechens began shooting at their bus, she said.

The passengers were herded off the bus and marched through the streets “like cattle” to the central square, where they were told to lie face down and not raise their heads.

“My sister raised one eye and saw that they were driving more people into the square,” she said. After lying on the square for an hour and a half, they were marched to the area around Town Hall, where the Chechens ordered some of the hostages to sit around a gasoline tank to thwart a possible Russian aerial attack.

“Their faces were so angry we thought they were going to kill us on the spot,” Svetlana said. When the hostages asked what the guerrillas wanted, they were told, “Just leave Chechnya alone.”

Finally, hundreds of hostages were marched for about half an hour to the hospital. Along the way, Chechen fighters fired at buses, at windows and into the air to keep the hostages in line. One guerrilla, whose boots were apparently uncomfortable, ordered a female hostage to give him her brand-new tennis shoes. She walked the rest of the way barefoot.

At the hospital, the gunmen inspected their captives’ documents. Two Russian pilots in uniform were taken away, Svetlana said. Then the hostages were divided among the hospital’s floors. Svetlana, her son and her sister were put in the surgical unit on the second floor.

They had drinking water, and the Chechens gave the children cookies and sodas that they had taken from a store near the hospital, but there was no food for the adults, she said. The Chechens appeared to have brought their own canned rations.

“We hid under the bed most of the time because it seemed safer,” Svetlana said.

The first night, apparently expecting an attack, the Chechens ordered that the windows be kept shut despite the heat that has smothered Russia for weeks. Filipp’s forehead was drenched in sweat all night.

The boy seemed unafraid, Svetlana said, except when the shooting began.

“He kept saying, ‘Ma, I’m sick of being here. Let’s go to Grandma’s,’ ” she said. He also announced that he would call Voltron, his Japanese robot toy, who would come and save them.

“When we were lying under the bed, he would say, ‘Ma, do you love me?’ I told him of course I did, and his eyes were so sad,” she said.

Svetlana did not see any hostages beaten or abused, nor did she witness any of the 10 executions of captives. But outside their windows, the women could see the bodies of four young men.

“The first days, the Chechens were very angry, at all of Russia as represented by us,” she said. “They said, ‘Your soldiers have shot our families. All the Chechens here have lost our families, and we have nothing left to lose.’ ”

Just before the Russian assault began, a Chechen told the Russian prisoners, “We’re not going to shoot you--we’ll just watch how your own soldiers will shoot you,” Svetlana said. When the Russian assault began, many women, including her sister, were forced to stand at the windows and ordered to shout “Don’t shoot!”

Svetlana said now she feels that Budennovsk was abandoned by the Russian government and that the hostages despaired when they heard that President Boris N. Yeltsin had flown off to the Group of Seven summit in Canada in the midst of the crisis.

“Last night on TV, it was disgusting to see his face smiling at the cameras,” she said bitterly. “I think that, if his relatives had been inside, he would not have gone anywhere.”